RIM Paid ~$100 Million for Paratek Multi-Band Radio Acquisition

While rereading RIM’s Q1 Fiscal 2013 statement again I noticed that RIM mentioned their latest acquisition. The only acquisition RIM made in Q1 Fiscal 2013 was Paratek at the beginning of the quarter on April 8th, 2012. In RIM’s Q1 results statement they specified that:

The total of cash, cash equivalents, short-term and long-term investments was $2.2 billion as of June 2, 2012, compared to $2.1 billion at the end of the previous quarter, an increase of approximately $100 million from the prior quarter. Cash flow from operations in Q1 was approximately $710 million. Uses of cash included intangible asset additions of approximately $285 million, capital expenditures of approximately $155 million and a business acquisition of approximately $100 million.

I am really curious to see what comes out of RIM’s Paratek acquisition since it came in pretty late in the BlackBerry 10 game. My guess is that it has something to do with hardware and will hopefully let RIM lead the multi-band pack in 2013. This is especially crucial since carriers are all over the place when it comes to LTE frequencies.

As we mentioned earlier, Paratek joins RIM’s string of acquisitions since their purchase of QNX on April 9th, 2010. Since then then have acquired Cellmania, Documents to Go assets, The Astonishing Tribe, Gist, TinyHippos, Tungle.me, Scoreloop, Ubitexx, Jaycut, and NewBay with Paratek rounding it out.